Genuinely hard core ... Vice TV's Soft Focus
Recent discussions around these parts have confirmed that most music fans - save perhaps for Jools Holland - are in agreement that the representation of music on TV in the UK is in a woeful state. And Jools only likes his own show Later With ... because he gets to spray all-comers with his risible boogie-woogie riffs and accidentally find himself host of the most popular music show by default.
There is light at the end of the music TV tunnel however, and perhaps unsurprisingly it comes from the internet. The recent discovery of Soft Focus on Vice TV, the channel run by the cynically hip but engaging Vice magazine gives us all hope for music television in the future.
Presented by Ian Svenonius, Soft Focus is a dream package: each episode is one straightforward interview with an artist of supreme interest. And that's it. There are no fancy locations, no props, no cut-aways, camera angles, no semi-pissed audience, no Mika promoting his new single, no sponsorship from a mobile phone company, no wry presenter speaking in that ironic, nervous-eyed style stolen from Simon Amstell. Instead, Soft Focus features a camera, a presenter and a guest with things to say. On paper it's hardly a revolutionary concept, yet watching Soft Focus makes one realise how utterly devoid of talent, the presenters, producers and programmers on today's terrestrial TV channels really are.
It helps that Svenonius is perfectly poised to present such a show. As frontman for Godlike bands such as Nations Of Ulysses, Make-Up and Weird War (and as pseudo-hipster David Candy, a solo artist) he has cut a fine sartorial swathe through the US underground for nearly twenty years. In that time, he's raised an arch eyebrow at the rise of grunge, nu metal, garage rock and more, and ignored all serious interest from what we can call the mainstream; a true cult, then.
In fact, you can trace the tastes and ideas that inform Soft Focus through Svenonius's own bands - whether in NOU's combination of free jazz and revolutionary hardcore punk, or the deep-fried psyche-funk of Weird War. He has also woven a web of theory and conspiracy with his music writing, recently collected in his low-key The Psychic Soviet, a book based around the conceit that rock 'n' roll's main purpose has always been as a US propaganda tool. It's one of the best reads on music published this decade.
Svenonius' informed, post-Open University interview style in Soft Focus mirrors his writing style: straight-faced, faux-academic and utterly committed to the belief that rock music is an intrinsic part of the wider planet - of culture, of society, economics and politics.
Soft Focus' first series focused on figures such as Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye, alongside mould-breakers such as Genesis P Orridge and Chan Marshall. Following the success of this thoughtful, no-frills series, Soft Focus recently filmed an even more engaging run of shows in the UK which have so far featured insight from a cast of living legends including Mark E Smith, Billy Childish, and Shaun Ryder.
Given that he got sense out of a lucid Ryder, belly laughs from a famously curmudgeonly Smith and revelations from an interview-shy Kevin Shields, Svenonius is casually appeasing a major target audience: the more cerebral underground rock fan, for whom TV shows have never truly existed.
Frustratingly you're only likely to see Soft Focus if directed to it. But when you do discover its charms, I'm sure you'll agree that Vice TV and Svenonius have come up with something that all youth/culture-orientated UK TV people behind the scenes have resolutely failed at: creating a music TV show that is both engaging and intelligent. And that, furthermore, features no actual music.
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